I went on a run this morning, three days after my 3*#th birthday.
Meh, maybe a third of a run. My gallant efforts to counterbalance my remarkable ability to eat my feelings—eat right through boredom, isolation, loneliness, tepid relations and limping ones—were foiled when I ran into someone.
I don’t mean bumped into someone familiar passing by, although that happened, too. I mean about six minutes after that, when I literally ran into someone. Another woman—let’s call her June—shorter and softer than me who tumbled unexpectedly out of her door for a bus while carrying her to-go home-coffee just as my full-on crying run came to its ridiculous crescendo. I apologized maybe more earnestly than I have ever given a person a contextless one-liner, “I’m so sorry.” She didn’t know just how sorry I was.
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Last night, I went to bed and things were fine. As fine as things usually are on a Monday night two days after my birthday, on which I marked the significant passage of time with strictly insignificant life achievements.
This morning, I awoke imagining the day’s worst problem might be whether or not to concede to my alarm and run before work or change the alarm and snooze just a bit more. That early-morning electronic fumbling landed me on a text message, that—while it turned out to be a childish, thoughtless prank—revealed a deception by someone close to me, an unintended, unforeseen consequence, as poorly researched childish pranks often have. So, quite truly, the depth of my regret and sorrow was utterly lost on June.
But this is July, a month that in 2019 meant a whole lot of Mercury Retrograde and a pretty busted month for a lot of my friends and peers. For those of you who think little or less of star alignments or juju or the syncopation of any energy—negative or positive—at one time: that’s just fine. I don’t really know what I think. I will say that when you and a friend, then two more, then seven more, then a full 20 seem to suffer the same death from 10,000 paper cuts in one weird-weathered month, it starts looking pretty suspicious.
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Today, the prescription for a heart so broken its unrecognizable (not one big, totalling crash; just countless fender benders and dings til the tin cup was mashed into an Unnamed Polygon) is Neko Case, Neko Case, a walk to Washington Square Park and more Neko Case. It’s funny, once when my life was buggered-to-moving in one fell swoop, I couldn’t listen to music at all. Not a song for months. Very selective listening for months more. Only listening of a kind that either very intentionally pricked my wounds so I could cry or was such detached pop-iness that it maintained my mindlessness. Now, I am moved to tapping, to singing, to annoying and/or alarming my new coworkers with my ever-hoarse voice.
Maybe it was just that for the last 6 or so months I have either been so happy or just so energetic about podcasts as my thinking-mute that I didn’t feel compelled to music. Maybe it is because I’ve been trying out new stuff (lazily). But I am having a renaissance with her prolific, prophetic, mind-reading catalogue.
It seems like when I have to exorcise an Andrew (lord knows it is a thing; it is A THING) for good from my life because we both find our relationship just a bit too delightful a tool for inflicting wounds on me, I turn to her. She is the perfect blend of anger and contemplation, of urgent beats and languid sadness, of fierce “Fuck you!” and fiercer “Fuck me.”
Of admission and accusation.
Of relief and longing.
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I already wonder if I did the right thing. I already half want to undo it. Half. I already remind myself I am not in charge here, and if there was any undoing, it would be dual-undoing—and that would never happen. And undoing only all my own doing is all I have ever been able to achieve.
I cannot change the tools I have to work with or the environment I have in which to use them. Only what I make and what I allow.
So on that note: This tornado loves you.